Happiness is that fine line between what you want and what you need

One of my neighbors hidden in the bushes

It was kind of windy today not bad enough to stir up the dust but just bad enough to keep me inside for a lot of the day.

For lack of something better to do I dug out my Virtual Reality goggles that I bought a while back to use while flying my drone. I never really got the hang of the things so I continued to use my phone's screen to fly it and see what the drone's camera is seeing.

That works okay but the screen is pretty small and no matter how bright I make the screen it's still very hard to see anything in the sunlight. I can tell what direction the cameras pointing but I can't really see exactly what it sees and the VR [ Virtual Reality ] goggles fix both of those problems.

When using the VR goggles I put my cell phone inside of the goggles and VR software on the cell phone doubles the picture and the lenses inside the VR goggles shows me a three-dimensional view of what the drone's camera sees, in effect I'm looking through the drones camera.

The whole concept is pretty amazing and seems like science fiction, for instance I've set the software so that when I move my head the drones camera looks in the direction I'm looking. You gotta admit that's pretty amazing.

You can also make it do something that I only tried once and it was almost a disaster. You can set the software so that the drone will FLY in the direction you're looking. Now that might sound like a cool way to fly the drone but actually it's a very easy way to crash an expensive drone, because if you're approaching something you don't want the drone to hit the first thing you do is look at the obstacle and that's where the drone goes.

So today I got out the VR goggles and the drone, hooked everything up and spent some time trying to get used to the goggles. I didn't actually fly around in the Arctic Fox, I might not be a rocket scientist but at least I'm smart enough not to be in a confined space with four sharp blades spinning at 3000 RPM. I just left it sitting on the floor and played with the camera.

The problem I had before with the VR goggles is they tend to make me dizzy and eventually feeling seasick.  when using the goggles to look through the drones camera it gives you the feeling that you're actually in the drone looking out the window, I guess that's why they call it virtual reality, but for the most part my reality is just feeling sick.

I'm really hoping with a little practice I can get used to the goggles because they actually are the best way to see what the drone is doing, and get the picture or video that you want on purpose and not just by luck. But I've always been prone to seasickness so it may be a battle I'm destined to lose.

                theboondork